October 2017

There being no institutional memory anymore — and the dummies at Washington Times therefore having no idea they ever published “The Blackmail of America: How the US Became the Albanian Mafia’s Enforcer” — last month they published longtime Albanian hire David L. Phillips on why Serbia simply must recognize Kosovo as a state. (Something Serbia was assured by the Western bosses it would never have to do, including as a precondition for EU membership — until of course it was told it would.)

I was a bit late with the letter, sending it on Sept. 27th, so perhaps that’s why it didn’t get published. Though when one writes against the grain of American “thinking” on the Balkans, one doesn’t need to look for excuses for being ignored.

Below is the letter — just for the record — with brackets containing reinserted parts I’d removed for space considerations.

[There is a striking similarity between the Kosovo/Bosnia conflicts and our current Yugoslavia Redux known as Russiagate: Right is indistinguishable from Left on this. And so Mr. Phillips’ byline — a staple of Huffington Post, NY Times and Washington Post — infects the comparatively more sensible Washington Times, as if it hasn’t already published articles long debunking the “facts” upon which Mr. Phillips’ perspective is based.

“Perspective” is in quotes because the view of this “Albania Project” director is paid for, something The Times should let readers know. Like other mouthpieces for the ever-expanding Albanian cause, Mr. Phillips offers nothing more than a wholesale graft of the ultranationalist, we-can-kill-Serbs-with-impunity-because-our-cause-is-just view.]

Without lending too much credence to the 2004 story in German-owned tabloid Blic that Mr. Phillips hosted Washington darling and president-slash-organ-trafficker Hashim Thaci at a lobbyist brainstorming dinner on advancing Kosovo independence (less than a week before the organized pogroms that expedited precisely that outcome), one must point out that indeed Kosovo leaders and Mr. Phillips’ good friends were notorious for the ability to turn Kosovo violence on and off like a switch.

Violence that Mr. Phillips hailed as a tactic in 2011, writing, “Kosovo Albanians have a track record of using violence to advance their political goals…: create a crisis, get the international community involved, and enlist foreign mediators in service of Kosovo’s agenda.” Mr. Phillips encouraged Barack Obama to follow the Clinton-Bush lead by “restoring Kosovo’s sovereignty and stabilizing the Western Balkans.” (At the time, some not-yet-cleansed Serbs were still trying to remain citizens of Serbia rather than supremacist, Serb-slicing Kosovo.)

This oft-repeated mantra “stabilizing the Balkans” is codespeak for giving Albanians what they want lest they resort to the means they know best, an M.O. Albania’s prime minister Edi Rama is now threatening all of Europe with if Albania is left out of the EU (while alternately threatening to merge with Kosovo, a goal we’d dismissed as “Serbian propaganda” in 1999).

[But if Mr. Phillips knows that “violence has served a purpose [in Kosovo] by mobilizing international mediation,” then surely he knows how Kosovo the state came to be. Analyst Jim Jatras last month offered an apt summary: “In the late 1990s, western intelligence services and their friends in the Islamic world, notably Saudi Arabia, the Gulf States, and Turkey, as well as al-Qaeda-linked Islamic ‘charities’, pumped weapons into Kosovo to support armed terrorist groups known as the ‘Kosovo Liberation Army’ (KLA). Headed by kingpins in the Albanian mafia, the KLA attacked Serbian officials and civilians, as well as murdered insufficiently militant Albanians, in a bid to invite a [Yugoslavian] government crackdown which would serve as a pretext for intervention by the international community, meaning the U.S. and NATO, to stop a fictional Serbian genocide of Albanians.”

Or maybe Mr. Phillips really doesn’t get it. How else to explain his tweet, in the aftermath of the Charlottesville clash, to “Read my article @HuffPost calling for dialogue & action to counter intolerance, bigotry, & hatred.” Intolerance, bigotry and hatred form the framework that birthed his Kosovo, and the glue that holds it together.]

Mr. Phillips, an early pal of Bosnia’s mujahedeen-importing Haris Silajdzic, is whom The Times publishes in all seriousness even as he’s struggled, in a nod to the intractability of the monster he helped create, to explain away the Islamismc radicalism taking hold of Albanians. Which of course couldn’t be related to the nationalist Albanian radicalism that got us here in the first place. That, we were told, was Serbian radicalism; God forbid 20/20 hindsight be a revelation that maybe that’s not what it was. But one can’t be an “expert” without failing to connect the dots.

And so we make do with some isolated admissions, such as this from Mr. Phillips in 2015: “The Government of Kosovo is partly to blame [for radicalization]. Kosovo is known for its corrupt governance and dysfunctional politics. Criminality is widespread. Public officials cavort with gangsters, rather than acting as role models.” As if this wasn’t the predictable logical conclusion of a KLA-run Kosovo.

Such is the beast Mr. Phillips demands Serbia recognize even as ‘Kosovars’ flee their dream state in droves. [What do we call them, then? Do they revert to just being Albanians?] And lest he sound momentarily objective above, Mr. Phillips immediately redirects the blame, to US policies — now “fuel[ing] support for ISIS” among Albanians, if you can imagine, by requiring any compromises at all from the Albanian side. “Religion offers a clear identity and a sense of belonging to Kosovars who feel abandoned by Western countries,” he wrote in 2015. Weren’t we asked to believe that our intervention on Albanian behalf would preclude such sympathies?

Perhaps Mr. Phillips’ most senile article — published this year on Huffington Post — raged that France would even consider honoring a Serbian warrant for Ramush Haradinaj, one of Kosovo’s endless streams of KLA-terrorists-turned-statesmen. Mr. Phillips actually cited Haradinaj’s two acquittals at The Hague — in trials notorious for witnesses dropping dead or dropping out. Good going, Washington Times.

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